George Will and the Iraq War Dead-Enders

Pete Wehner’s criticism of George Will’s latest column seems to boil down to his annoyance that Will used to be a war supporter:

But I do believe that now that he’s claiming Iraq is “the worst foreign-policy decision in U.S. history,” Will might want to admit from time to time that he believed, pre-Iraq war, it was a terrific and necessary idea.

I’m not sure what point Wehner thinks he’s making here. Yes, Will wrongly supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Like most other prominent pundits at the time, he bought into the official case for attacking Iraq and defended it. Like almost all other Republican and conservative pundits, he continued to defend the administration’s decision to invade long after he should have rejected the arguments behind it. Unlike Wehner and the few remaining true believers in a bad cause, however, Will evidently wised up and realized that his previous view had been mistaken. Put another way, if “there was no more articulate advocate for the war” than Will before the invasion, shouldn’t it concern Wehner that the same person now denounces the war as the greatest mistake in the history of U.S. foreign policy? I happen to think Will is wrong about that. U.S. involvement in WWI and Vietnam easily outstrip the Iraq war as inexcusable errors and senseless wastes of American lives, but that doesn’t make the Iraq war any less of a debacle.

Even if the Iraq war isn’t the worst blunder in U.S. history, it is surely one of the worst. It certainly doesn’t count as a success or a victory, no matter how many times self-serving hawks say that it was, and the fact that one of their former allies now repudiates the war in the strongest terms should tell those hawks that they have been profoundly wrong all along. It isn’t Will who must account for his turn against the war. Any sane person would have recoiled from the Iraq war in the years that followed the invasion. The people that have to explain themselves are the Iraq war hawks that continue to spread falsehoods about that war to defend an indefensible policy.

25 Responses to George Will and the Iraq War Dead-Enders

I am sorry, the run-up to the Iraqi war saw the same transparent propaganda that we saw in Syria, Ukraine, Libya, Kosovo,… you name it. It’s always about some evil that needs to be stopped, some “new Munich”, or my favorite, “the region clamoring for US leadership but being afraid to say it”, which is sometimes put forward when the “issue” of Iran comes up.

The ultimate irony is the total silence of this “war party” in one true genocide of the previous decades – the one in Ruanda.

So those who “buy into” this kind of nonsense are either dumb or dishonest about their true motives. In either case, they don’t deserve any serious space in the media or the debate about the issue. Sorry, Mr. Will.

@ JohnG, I totally agree JohnG there was the pundit class, which went with the war and anyone who spoke against it in the same terms that you describe above was labeled as derisive. I’m no Dove and at the time, I figured it was pretty shaky evidence for a war. A reason for war is 2000 plus fighter bombers decimating your countries fleet in a surprise attack…Iraq was more like the Mexican American War drummed up over mere skirmish.

One last observation. It isn’t the unwillingness of the punditry class to revisit and hold itself accountable for the disasters of our Government’s foreign policy forays these past two decades that concerns me so much as the pervasive and systemic unwillingness of our Government to hold itself accountable. That goes for our last three Presidents on down, and includes the impeached President’s wife who was a prime mover for a particularly nasty debacle that festers even now. One is left wondering where the check on this continuing insanity is going to come from.

I agree that WWI was the worst. If the US hadn’t gotten involved, the British/French side would have made a negotiated peace with the German side. Instead, the US entered and caused the war to drag on, with an obscene death toll, leading to the Total Defeat of the Germans and the punishing Versailles Treaty that, by ruining the German economy and stoking resentment, led to WWII.

“It isn’t the unwillingness of the punditry class to revisit and hold itself accountable for the disasters of our Government’s foreign policy forays these past two decades that concerns me so much as the pervasive and systemic unwillingness of our Government to hold itself accountable. ”

The first helps the second quite a bit.

“…and includes the impeached President’s wife who was a prime mover for a particularly nasty debacle that festers even now”

Barry, “would not have lead Germany to try” _what_ again? Try to prevail in a 2 front war that they believed was inevitable by being the aggressor again? Why would they believe a war against France and Russia was inevitable after WWI?

Of course it is pointless to debate what would’ve happened if WWI ended differently, but to believe that both world wars were a result of Germany’s insatiable desire to conquer Europe ignores too many facts.

Furthermore, didn’t Hitler make it rather clear that his primary motivation in becoming the Hitler we all know and hate was the outcome of WWI? Based on that fact alone, I don’t think we can dismiss Rich’s comment quite so easily.

“Naturally the common people don’t want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, IT IS THE LEADERS of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is TELL THEM THEY ARE BEING ATTACKED, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. IT WORKS THE SAME IN ANY COUNTRY.”

“WWI was the worst. If the US hadn’t gotten involved, the British/French side would have made a negotiated peace with the German side.”

The US got involved after Russia mutinied in early 1917 and the Tsar’s government collapsed. At that point it appeared that Germany would win the war and that England and France would be unable to repay their massive loans from US bankers.

Bankers told Wilson to get over there pronto and bail them out, or else. Bankers also looked to the war emergency as an opportunity to crush organized labor in the US.

The US entry probably shortened the war as Germany’s premature and desperate assault on Northern France and in Flanders in early 1918 (Operation Michael) ended with Germany’s exhaustion.

After the Americans went onto the offensive in Meuse-Argonne the German center collapsed, another six weeks of fighting and the Allies would have been in Berlin. Pershing wanted to keep fighting until Germany was crushed but the Europeans — mindful of the troop mutiny among the French after the Nivelle Offensive — decided to accept the German offer of armistice. At this time there was a mutiny on the German side.

World War Two was another ‘Bankers’ War’ in that both the Japanese militarists and Hitler and his party were funded/supported by Western industrial and banking interests during their rise to power … this support was predicated on their promises to attack Russia and destroy Soviet Communism … if they could.

The Japanese were swept aside in Mongolia by Zhukov in 1939, as for Hitler … everyone knows what happened next.

I’m not sure Will was a war supporter for very long. He wryly commented that only two men separate Iraq from a successful transition to democracy: “Madison and Jefferson”– or a joke something like that. That was early maybe in 2003, in City Journal.

“Barry, “would not have lead Germany to try” _what_ again? Try to prevail in a 2 front war that they believed was inevitable by being the aggressor again? Why would they believe a war against France and Russia was inevitable after WWI?”

Remember that in both WWI and WWII Germany tried to secure their western front with a blitzkrieg, so that the bulk of their war would be a one-front war.

I assure you the old guard GOP elite is still saying W Bush did not make a “mistake,” was underestimated and could be redeemed, while some are pushing Jeb Bush, who I assume has never repudiated the Iraq War.

“Otherwise, he gets away with “I’ve moved on and now I am going to attack the position I once held and hope no one notices”.

I appreciate this comment. I think it has deep core value. Our understanding of accountability is largely rooted in liberal theocracy. That the table is so loaded with complicit members none are willing to hold each other to account l’est they offend their friends —

“Oooops, we a were all wrong about that — sorry, we made a wreck of your life.” And that seems to be the extent of it, if that much.

Part of the [problem is that it takes so long to get those doing the damage to admit they were wrong that in the process they have muddies the path so thoroughly that even their admissions are clouded in such a manner as to obscure their culpability.

I refuse to believe that we have paid the price for what utter insanity we have unleashed in the ME and may spread throughout the Ukraine, uncomforted by the fact that the EU was in on the play.

If we are going to use the policeman model for dealing with the world’s ills. It explains the deep canyons between blacks and whites as to policing and criminal justice.

I think many of us believed that Iraq had WMD based on what our government was telling us. There is a lesson here after 200,000 Iraqi civilian deaths on why people in other nations hate us. Unfortunately, like the first decade after Vietnam, we will have a foreign policy paralysis that will be perceived by opportunistic countries as an American weakness. Like World War One we will be dealing with the ramifications of this bad decision for a hundred years. Thank you Mr. Bush.

I don’t see how George Will can be criticized for finally realizing the magnitude of the Iraq disaster. His statement that the Iraq war was “the worst foreign-policy decision in U.S. history” is absolutely correct. It however was not original historians and foreign policy experts were saying the same thing prior to the Iraq War. Even talk show host and pundit Michael Savage devoted many show segments to what a stupid idea the Iraq war was.

We will be paying for the stupidity of the Bush Administration for at least another 40 years. He managed in one stroke to destabilize an entire region and empower Iran at the same time. Bush did absolutely nothing about Iran’s nuclear program except to make a few jingoistic speeches. When he invaded Iraq, Iran’s historical enemy, he handed the extreme mullah’s that run Iran the biggest plum. He removed the Sunnis and created another Shia country aligned with Iran. In addition to empowering Iran he succeeded in empowering worldwide jihadism against the U.S. Within 9 months the number of Jihadists in Iraq grew from about 5,000 to well over 50,000 more than a factor of 10. The number of terrorist attacks against the U.S. interests increased dramatically. There is no question that America’s national security has been negatively impacted by our misguided Iraq adventure.

The original Bush estimate for the war was $50B to $60B; the latest life cycle cost estimates exceed $6T. In simple terms the original Bush estimate was off by more than a factor of 100 times! What is not in dispute is that Dick Cheney profited immensely from the Iraq war. His Halliburton holdings appreciated more than 32,000% or more than 320 times.

Whatever the real reason for going into Iraq were, it was aperient to the rest of the world that the Bush administration was lying about weapons of mass destruction. I was traveling worldwide at the time of the Iraq run up. The world’s press widely reported that weapons of mass destruction claims were either grossly overstated or outright fabrications. It seemed the only two countries that believed this fiction were the U.S. and the U.K. However many people in the U.K. did not believe the exaggerated claims of Bush and Blair. It was just in the U.S. where these claims received any credence. History has proved the rest of the world correct and the Bush Administration wrong.

George Will is correct. The decision to invade Iraq was indeed the worst foreign policy decision in our history.